VAN TOUR | A Photographer & Travel Consultant Live Full-Time On The Road

Hello this is Patrick with New Jersey's Outdoor Adventures YouTube channel. I was camping out today and I bumped into Sarah and Jess with Uphill Adventure. They have a really cool Instagram account and they have a YouTube channel with lots of really cool tours and they're going to give us a tour of their Sprinter van conversion today. Hello and welcome to New Jersey Outdoor Adventures. Hey thanks for having us. Hi. So this is our 2019 Mercedes Sprinter van. It is the 170 extended model. It's two-wheel drive, it's four-cylinder and it's their gas model which was new last year when we bought it. Yeah so we love it and we converted it with two of our very good friends at Frank Design Company. They're here in New Jersey and we've known them for a long time and they helped us build this thing. Absolutely. Yeah so we can go ahead and step in. This right here is where we keep our shoes. We yeah thought long and hard about where to store these and this just worked for us because Jessica here needed a plant balcony. Mostly the shoe storage is because we needed the plant balcony and so what to do with this other space. Yeah. Yeah yep and as we step in here kind of the first thing that's noticeable is that we blocked off our cab. We did this for stealth, we did this for insulation and we just like the aesthetic look of it. So we do have this door here that we can use as a pass-through. We use this a lot more than we anticipated. We kind of thought that we would always open up the front doors and come around when moving back and forth in between the cab and the body but we actually crawl through pretty regularly. Up top here is the headliner shelf that we built. We store our window coverings in here which we made with my mom using fabric from a local fabric store and our wool insulation. So we did insulate the body of the van with Havelock wool insulation. We use that on the ceiling and the walls. The floor we used like a thin the board insulation the foam board which we did to give us the most amount of head height and kind of standing space in here. So if we look here at our bench this is all open storage. We store our backpacks in here. We have a tub in the back of like sweaters and winter clothes but it's pretty open as you see. We have plenty of space and then if we move right into our kitchen here so we have custom cabinetry that we built to fit our space. Our first pullout drawer here is our toaster oven. We're an all-electric build no propane so we cook using our toaster oven as well as our induction burner. It's one burner we keep it in this drawer and we take it out plug it in on the countertop to use it. We thought about doing like one of those inductions that's inset into the countertop. We actually had that in the plans but when we kind of mapped it out and saw how little counter space we would have if we did that we decided to go with the freestanding one instead. If we move along here to the drawers this is our kind of silverware miscellaneous drawer. Keep all of our goodies in here. We've got a fold-down drawer here for our toothbrushes toothpaste just like that. Under the sink we store our trash can. We've got our cleaning supplies, our shampoos and conditioners down here, their Puracy which is a completely biodegradable product and then we have a big hot water heater. It's a four gallon electric Bosch hot water heater. We have only used a handful of times up until this point but it's been nice when we've used it for the shower. We don't use it for the sink. Next we have our isotherm to 12 volt fridge. We can store a ton of food in here. We don't have much right now but it's got its own little freezer as well where Jess makes her coffee ice cubes and it's great on energy and efficiency because it is 12 volt so we don't need to run our inverter to use it. Up here is pantry storage and all of these cabinets these ones up here are have magnetic catches on them to you know prevent them from opening as we drive. We've noticed that we've had to add a few more here and there as we've gone along. We've got two on this one but in here we store food and our plates, our pots, our bowls, things of that nature. Up top we've got more storage. We've got cups and just various kind of small food items that we kind of tucked away in these baskets here. We've got our back splash here which is a stick-on tile so it's not real tile it's just a sticker but our friends with Frank Design did a great job you know lining it up making it symmetrical and we really really love it. It adds you know a nice color in here. Over here on this side is technically it's a knife holder. We don't use it to hold knives. We have a couple of different hooks that we put up here. We'll put glasses, rings on them, jewelry, things like that just to keep them out of the way. We have light switches here for our under cabinet lighting. All of our lights are on a dimmer. We kind of probably went a little bit overboard with the amount of lights that we have. We've got two here under cabinet. We have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight in the I guess living space. They're on their own switch and then we've got four over the bed on their own switch and one in the shower. They're all dimming. We don't use them all but we like to have them. Our ceiling is tongue and groove. It's pine. It came from just your local kind of hardware store. Very easy to install and we love the look of it. We really like the natural woods. Yeah we just sealed it. We didn't do anything else. Yep nothing else to it just put a coat of poly over it and that was that. So if we want to move it over here into I don't know I guess like our sitting area. We have this fold up table that we made. We just recently installed this lock on it because twice now, twice or three times, we had bumped into it and the whole thing came crashing down but now with this lock that we put on here it's you know pretty good to go. We do have a small wooden folding chair that we keep in the cab behind our passenger seat which we pull out and we'll use as a chair in the middle here and one of us will sit on our little laundry bench and we have a van tour video out and one of the comments that we got so often on our van tour video was that this bench is not adequate as a seat. It was never intended to be a seat. It covers our wheel well and also and inside it stores our laundry. It just kind of was a happy bonus that someone could sit on it so we put a little cushion on top and are making the most of it. So if we scoot over here this is our bathroom space. It is a well what we have in here is a composting toilet. It's the nature's head. We had never used a composting toilet before this but absolutely love it. We know that not everybody opts to have a bathroom or a toilet on the road with and we certainly couldn't live without it. We have a shower as well which we've used a handful of times. We sometimes we tend to shower at gyms if we you know have a membership to like a climbing gym or something like that but it's not always something that we you know will get if we're not in a city so it's nice to have a shower here. It makes us you know be able to live off the grid and you know not worry about you know having to get to a local gym or you know somewhere especially having a toilet as well. Definitely. We have the Nautilus kind of retractable self-cleaning shower door here. What that means is that the water kind of squeezes its way off as you close it and inside the floor of our bathroom it's cedar planks that we put together with our builder and if we will pull this plant out of here for now and the whole thing is removable. We used the same wall board on the bottom. I think it's the FRP wall board and you know it gives us the flexibility to be able to take the whole thing out and it works really well. It's kind of like a little luxurious touch so you know just makes the whole bathroom a lot nicer. Definitely. Next we have our max air fan. We've got our controller for it here. It sucks air in as well as pushes air out which is great for ventilation because we don't have air conditioning in here but if you crack open some of our windows turn the fan on it gets the circulation going really really well. It's an automatic open and close so it's really nice. Next in here is our control panel. We've got our AC and DC panels. We've got our inverter control here as well as our CTEK battery monitor so it's all very easy to operate. If we want to use anything that's 120 volt we just turn our inverter on turn on the AC panel and then if we want to turn our outlets on turn on our toaster oven. We have a couple of extra switches in there. We don't have air conditioning. We don't have an air conditioner. We don't have a heater but that's what they're named so that's what we went with. The next thing that we have going down is our closet which we absolutely love. Maybe favorite part of the build. Maybe favorite part of the build. It was essential to us to have good clothes storage. We don't own a lot of clothes at all. We're very minimalistic. We actually sold all of our belongings just over a year ago when we left to hike part of the Pacific Crest Trail so coming back and moving into a van we were used to living in a backpack in a tent so this is very luxurious and we don't have a lot of things but I didn't want to do the packing cubes. I didn't want to you know struggle with like a top open shoving all the clothes in so we came up with this design of doing just the pullout drawers and they are huge. They store a lot of clothes. There's Deepa's in the back of the van here. We share the top one. We each have a separate one. During the winter time Jess had a third one but it's turned into a miscellaneous drawer here just to store kind of things that we are struggling to find a better place with and then down here is like our toiletries. We've got our toiletry bag our little vacuum just you know knicks and knacks and other things that fit nicely down there. Our towels get folded up and go down there as well so if we circle back to the bed area here our main concern or our main priority with the bed was our ceiling height or having enough space to sit on the bed comfortably. We didn't want to bump our heads. We wanted to you know make sure that we could you know kind of exist on the bed and not feel claustrophobic because we don't have bikes. We don't have anything that needed to raise our quote-unquote garage in the back up higher so we were able to prioritize our headspace. That's the big thing for us. As you can see we put in all of these windows. So we bought the van as a cargo van which meant it had no windows. It was a big giant empty white box. It was a priority for Jess to get as many windows in here as possible. So we put the big window on the slider door. We put this window here. We had our two back windows installed professionally because those are adhesive base and it freaked me out to pick them up with the suction cups and hold them on there with the adhesive glue. You guys were convinced for a hot minute that you could do it and I was there for it. I was like I want those windows and I don't want them shattered on the ground. Yeah so we had those ones put in professionally but all the rest of them we did with Frame Design Company. As far as the bed goes our mattress is a six inch memory foam. We find it to be very comfortable. Absolutely. Yeah I know that six inches kind of small but it's working very well for us and underneath of our mattress again it was a priority for Jess to have. We don't want to run into any moisture issues which I know can be a problem with memory foam mattresses. So on our bed frame we have lots of holes drilled in to allow for the airflow and then before that we have what's it like a den dry I think is what it's called. Yeah we've got this pad to kind of help circulate the air and then we have these holes drilled all the way through. Yep I see that being used on siding for houses behind cedar shakes and stuff like that to allow them to dry. Yeah so that we just wanted to make sure that we had no moisture issues there. So on this side of our bed here we have our light controls for the bathroom for the overhead the bed lights. This is one of our mains. We have another main on the bench there also on a dimmer and then here we have our heated floor thermostat. So we have electric heated floors they are made to run under vinyl which is what our floors are. It's a luxury vinyl plank flooring and the electric heated floors they work well to heat the floors. I would not say that they are a substitute for heat maybe it raises the temperature in here by two or three degrees but it's just like another little added luxury. We turn them on they don't use much power at all even though they are 120 so they require the inverter but they don't use a lot of power it's like a slow draw over a long period of time. So we turn them on for a bit and get our toes nice and toasty and turn them off. You want to talk about under the bed? I would love to talk about under the bed. So we designed this van knowing that we were going to adopt a puppy one day. This space is for the puppy when we have him we'll probably stick a crate under here or at some point we might build a door in so that we can just open and close it. There is also a little outlet back there that you can't see quite yet it's on the other side of this where we're going to install a pet air conditioner if it ever comes back in stock so that way he has plenty of airflow back there. Yeah other than that this guy is just a little pull-out drawer for our toilet paper and laundry soap and a couple of other medical things band-aids and such. Yeah we hoped to put a pet AC in when we were doing the build but the one that we were looking at has been out of stock for over a year now. We're hoping that it comes back this summer but what we'd like to do is put like the condenser under the van and then you know have it run kind of right into that corner there especially you know just so it's safe for for the pup. It hasn't gotten that warm in here but that is a priority for us. So I think that kind of wraps up the inside of the van. If we want to move around to the back so this is what I guess van lifers refer to as the garage. As you can see we are able to store a lot back here. We have both of our hiking packs which it's a priority for us to bring these. We did like I said do about three and a half months of long distance hiking before we moved into the van so we wanted to make sure to have these with us. We've got this nice floor that we put in here just to kind of I guess keep things clean in the garage. It doesn't look bad if it gets dirty if it scratches. It was very inexpensive so it was good for us to you know just put that in. This side holds our water so we've got our gray water gauge. We've got our outdoor shower hookup which we plan to utilize a lot with our puppy and we have our fill for our fresh water. Inside here we've got a 40 gallon fresh water tank. We have the SureFlow pump and accumulator with that. We use the PEX piping everywhere. It's not that flexible it was a little bit difficult to work with but you know overall we got it to a place where we're very happy with it and we like the setup that we have. So anyone that's seen our van tour Uphill Adventure will notice that this looks a lot different. So the earlier I guess last month we hung out with our friends at Frank Design and redid the back section. We weren't happy with it when we left in January but it was time to go. It was way too cold here we couldn't get anything else done so we just chucked in two extra batteries that we had to buy and hit the road. But now that it's warm we came back and it was our priority to make this garage more of what we intended from the start. So when we built it we had planned for this section over here to be our electrical. So as you can see we have a lot of storage on the top here. We're able to store our toolbox. This container here holds our hose, our outdoor shower pump, our water filter which is just like your RV filter. We are planning on getting a little travel Berkey for drinking water because apparently this filters everything but it doesn't taste very good. And this is just like our miscellaneous junk drawer. It's got manuals from things that are in the van that all these things that I don't think we need but I don't know better safe than sorry I guess. Way in the back there we have more storage. We've shoved our shore power cord back there as well as we have some socket wrenches again just in case. It feels like smart things to have. So inside here are the guts to our kind of electrical component. This whole thing comes out if it will cooperate but it might not right now because of our shore power cord. So we're just going to fold it back. We have a total of four 12 volt deep cycle AGM Renogy batteries. We started with two. The plan was to have two but long story short we realized that we needed more because we're an all-electric build and the ones that we have or the ones that we had, the two existing batteries, weren't working their best. We thought we might have wrecked them but they were salvaged. It was just cold and we ended up adding two more batteries. Next to that we have our Renogy 3000 watt inverter again which we need to run our 120 volt appliances. We have a Ctech battery monitor and that includes a smart isolator so we charge our batteries when we're driving from the alternator. We also charge them by the solar that we have on the roof. We have six 100 watt Renogy solar panels up there. We started with four. We had hoped to have four and then to have a little deck area at the back but again when we realized that our electrical needs were not being met we had to install the additional two. But since we've done that and we came back and rewired our batteries so we've got two under here and we've got our other two tucked under the side. Since that we have had great success with our batteries. We've been able to run all of our high wattage appliances that have a big power draw at the beginning and we weren't getting enough voltage to do that because I don't think that our batteries were wired quite right. But now they all are and everything is looking great. Heated floors for days. Heated floors for days. Yeah just turned on our heated floors yesterday. I was like are you kidding me? It's amazing how all this stuff that you have out here fit nice and neat in the back there. People don't realize how much potential storage there is as long as you get their correct size bins and are mindful of when you're designing what you're going to bring with you. So you guys did a great job at utilizing the storage. Yeah thank you. It was difficult to find containers and bins to fit the spaces to be honest because we hadn't planned well everything that we planned to be custom we built in. So like we built in our closet drawers, we built in our kitchen cabinets and all those things into various sizes. So finding correct bins to fit those spaces were a little bit difficult but Target was a win for that. Yeah so I guess to wrap up kind of the back section here we built these just out of plywood. What comes on the van are the black kind of flexible plastic and we just don't think that it matched our aesthetic so we used them as templates and cut these guys out. We've got our wool insulation behind here and behind all of our plywood on the sliding door as well as here just to give it a nice aesthetic. Want to close that one first? We also have, this is probably a good thing to note, we are trying to be safe individuals so we have a smoke detector slash carbon monoxide detector in here which sits right next to our we-boost that we have. We haven't used our we-boost much. I think we turned it on one day but we haven't really done any camping out in the middle of nowhere since. We like to go and visit cities so we spent almost two months down in Austin over the winter as well as places in Florida but we'll see if we if we need it. It was one of those purchases that seemed like everybody that had a van had a we-boost so we were like we have to have a we-boost we have a van. I don't know I mean I would say make the decision for yourself. For us it's one of those things that we'll see if it pays off or not but yeah I think does that do it? Oh we'll talk over here yeah we have our shore power plug in here so that we can charge up at campsites. We've tried plugging into like our friend's house and stuff. I don't know if we just don't get enough like of a good power supply for that or what. It charges the batteries very slowly at the campsites but the campsites top notch. Yeah so if we want to move up to the front here we will talk about the cab. Oh look at that spider oh my gosh. Am I brave enough? All right so here we have the cab. It drives very very well. That's another question we get a lot. Another question we do get a lot especially because of the way we distributed our weight. We don't have weight on one side of our van the passenger side. As far as cabinetry. Yes cabinetry things like that. We do have our water over there which a 40 gallon tank weighs 40 times eight what 300 pounds-ish when you fill it all the way and our two batteries weigh a lot and they're on that side now so it drives pretty well overall. I have a Toyota truck at home and it gets better gas mileage than that. We've put about 8,500 miles on it and it averages for that time 17 and a half miles to the gallon which we think is pretty great. So overall yeah I mean just a normal cab. We haven't done any changes up here. We would maybe like to get a new stereo system. That was one of my wishes during the build process but as the budget kind of quickly got out of hand we realized that that wasn't going to happen for now yeah. Thank you for taking the time to provide our viewers with a tour of your van. We have a lot of folks on the channel that are in the process of building their own van camper and it's helpful to see someone that has completed it and used it for a while and did modifications to it to suit their needs because you don't know what you don't know. You could read a lot you could see a lot online but everybody's going to build their van to cater to their needs. If they haven't done it before their initial approach might be different than their second approach. Now that you have it at this stage and there are some things that you know they're permanent cabinets you could always move them. Would you do anything differently if you were to build this from scratch again? Chassis, motorhome conversion, components. Is there anything that stands out that you would do completely different? I would say the number one thing for me is our electrical system. When I was doing research on this lithium batteries existed but they were not widely used yet I would say and that was just a year ago. You know they were certainly out there and I remember coming across them and thinking wow those batteries are very expensive. I don't see the point in that. Doesn't seem like many people are using them. We're just going to use these ones. Hindsight obviously I wish that we had gone with lithium batteries. We could have saved hundreds of pounds in weight and space. They're so much smaller. We would have had a battery system where you don't have to worry about the drain that you take on them. You can take lithium batteries pretty much all the way to empty and not worry about you know having to mess them up. Whereas these AGM batteries you can't really take that deep or you know you might do some damage to them. Lithium batteries are a lot more expensive up front though and I mean looking back at our process we would have had to give up a lot of things in order to be able to afford to do lithium batteries in the first place. But you know looking back I think we would have done that or found the money somewhere. We just had a few headaches. Other than that I mean we love the layout of our van. We love the open design, the open feel. You couldn't imagine it any other way to be honest. No we are not lacking for storage in the least. And then besides the cost of the van because people could buy a used van, they could buy a brand new one and spec it out to their needs and then do their conversion. What would you estimate the overall cost for someone to do a conversion like this? So we actually have a video on that and the breakdown of everything that we put into the conversion on our YouTube channel Uphill Adventure. But I'll let you. Yeah our total our total cost for what we spent converting the van was $22,000 to $23,000. That includes the labor costs for things that we had installed like our back windows. That includes the labor costs for Frank Design Company. You can do it for a lot more expensive. You can do it for a lot less. I've seen you know people that do it for like five grand and have you know a fantastic van that suits their needs. It's just about what works for you but that's how much we spent on our conversion. I get a lot of questions about insurance. Whether you insure it as a regular vehicle or do you try to get RV insurance. Is there anything that you want to mention on that? Do you want to do this one? Sure. So I'm a photographer and I actually have insurance through State Farm already. So I just reached out to them and they were happy to give us a quote that covered the cost of the van and the cost of the conversion to insure it just the way it is now. So if we had any issues it would all be covered. Yeah which is huge because I reached out to the company that I have insurance with as well as four or five other companies. None of them would insure the van in its current state given that licensed RV outfitters did not build the van. So State Farm is the only one that we know of that will do that. So we have the van insured looking just like this. And then RVIA is kind of like a seal that goes on the side of a RV that's converted from a manufacturer. And the insurance companies typically would insure an RVIA certified unit that was built to safety standards for plumbing, electrical, egress, fire safety. So that's what they might have meant by that. Now what's next? What are your next adventures? I'm so glad that you asked. We are getting a puppy very soon. A little golden retriever. His name is Oliver. He's gonna sleep right there. Yeah three weeks. We're getting a puppy in three weeks which is gonna flip our world upside down. Absolutely. We've trained service dogs for years but this is gonna be our first forever dog for us which is very exciting especially for Jess. Yes we're very excited to take him out on the road. We might go up to Michigan and actually do some camping. Maybe spend some time on the lakes. Teach him how to swim. Just enjoy the summer. Yeah so that's our plan for the summer and then this fall we are getting married. Still hopefully fingers crossed. So we'll be going back down to Austin for that which is where we're getting married in the fall. Well congratulations to you both. Looks like you have an excellent year ahead of you. Thank you for taking the time for New Jersey Outdoor Adventures to give a tour of your van. I'm going to make sure I include links to Sarah and Jess's Uphill Adventure Instagram account website and their YouTube channel if you want to follow their adventures. Well this is Patrick with New Jersey's Outdoor Adventures YouTube channel. Hope you enjoyed this video. 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